Woe to him that buildeth a town with blood, and stablisheth a city by iniquity! -Habbakuk 2:12

Wednesday, August 31, 2005

Brutal Katrina lives on

Some of the media coverage I am seeing of Hurricane Katrina speaks of floodwaters 'continuing to rise', etc. but I believe that this may be misleading some to think that these waters are simply the kind of floodwaters that would follow a big storm. They aren't.

This is something entirely different: this is lakewater pouring into a city that sits as much as 20 ft below sea level. New Orleans is normally kept dry by a system of levees, but these levees have ruptured, and water is going to continue to pour into the city until these levees have been repaired. And the water that is there already will stay there until it is somehow pumped out.

Even calling this "water" is a bit of a misnomer, since it is more like a soup made from raw sewage, alligators, oil refinery offal, and everything else in the city Katrina has swallowed.

Katrina is not, as some might think, fading into the background. Her aggressive assault on the city of New Orleans continues, and I doubt we have even had a glimpse of the scope of the human suffering she will eventually cause.